William Blake Part 1

William Blake.

by Charles Gardner.

Preface

This book is an attempt to trace the mental and spiritual growth of William Blake as disclosed in his works. After meditating on these for some years an image of the man has risen in my mind. This I have tried to present with the aid of such biographical details as are to be found in Gilchrist's _Life_. My warm thanks are due to Mr and Mrs Sydney Morse for permission to reproduce their beautiful _Prayer of the Infant Jesus_, and _The Burial of Moses_. The photographs were taken by Mr Albert Hester.

Also I must thank Mr J. M. Dent for the two designs from an original and invaluable _Job_ series in his possession. The rest of the ill.u.s.trations are from the Print Room of the British Museum.

C. G.

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND APPRENTICESHIP

William Blake was born on November 28th, 1757, at 28 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Golden Square.

To-day a large house stands in Broad Street numbered 28, to which is attached a blue disk announcing that William Blake, Poet and Artist, was born there. The house looks old and shabby, and may well have stood a hundred years; but on inquiry one finds that it is a recent erection, and that of Blake's actual house not one stone has been left upon another. One walks through Broad Street and its neighbouring streets hoping to see at least one group of buildings as Blake saw them. But all has changed, and except for a block of houses on one side of Golden Square, there is nothing to remind one of the sharp transitions that a few years can effect. Even the sounds have changed. From the doors and windows of Number 28 is heard day and night the whir of machinery ceaselessly at work to supply the inhabitants of Pall Mall and St James's with electric light.

Carnaby Market has vanished, and its glowing colours have reappeared in Berwick Street, where fruits are displayed on public stalls, and where from time to time t.i.tled ladies are known to explore in search of a pair of boots, or some other indispensable article of clothing. Great ugly buildings--a brewery, an infirmary given up during the war to Belgian refugees, warehouses--afflict the eye at every turn; and through the open windows of the upper stories the social regenerator may detect the countless bent backs and expert fingers of tailor hands turning out perfect equipments for n.o.blemen all over the country who come to Regent Street, Maddox Street, and Conduit Street to be measured and fitted and tried.

In Blake's day the transitions in Broad Street were more clearly defined.

It had been a fashionable quarter, and still retained a vivid memory of its past glory. The new buildings were shops of a good solid kind, which struck the eye like vivid green paint as they sprang up side by side with the older private houses that time had softened and mellowed.

Blake's father was a hosier. His name was James, he was married to Catherine, and they had five children, William being the second. James was a dissenter, but, like so many dissenters, he liked such important functions as baptism, marriage, and burial to be performed by the Church of England, that there might be no mistake about them. Accordingly, William was taken on December 11th, when he was a fortnight old, to be christened at St James's Church in a Grinling Gibbons font, the highly ornate character of which was fortunately not observed by the tender recipient of baptismal grace.

William was a solitary, imaginative boy. His imagination was first stimulated and nourished by town. His father's home, in sharp contrast with the older houses in the neighbourhood, made him perceive that there was a meaning Past as well as a so-far unmeaning Present: and the moment his imagination escaped into the past it tended to abstraction, but knew no bounds.

Very soon in his solitary walks he found his way into the country, emerging from London on the south side and exploring as far as Peckham Rye, Dulwich, Streatham, and Sydenham. His first glimpse of the country was to him as our first trip abroad to us. The trees, the hills, the gra.s.s and the cattle spoke obliquely to an imagination that already had a bias.

He loved them--with discretion. To him London was older than the country.

Nature has a way of disguising her great age in an ever renewed youthful present. London's present drives one to the past. Nature bewitches her children and will not allow them to transcend her. A great city with its pulsing life carries the exuberant spirit in its mighty rhythm, and yet drives it back to the ancient primeval sources concealed in the eternal kingdom of the imagination. Wordsworth, Nature's lover, soothes and lulls our restlessness and pain, but fails to carry us into the promised land.

Blake, the inspired citizen, pierces with his sword through Nature, and will not rest until in England's green and pleasant land he has built Jerusalem, wherein we may feast as comrades and be satisfied with the wine of eternity.

Little William Blake was not like other children, or he might have romped with his three brothers, John, James, and Robert, and his sister, Catherine. But from the first he was peculiar, sensitive, and liable to visions. His first recorded vision was in Peckham Rye. There he saw a tree filled with angels. He was neither startled nor surprised. It seemed entirely natural, and, childlike, he told his vision to his parents when he reached home. Visions were not in his father's line of business. In the dark days of popish supremacy there had been idle monks who thrashed and starved themselves till they saw visions. Even the reformed Church of England knew better than that, and a dissenter of the eighteenth century who spent his spare hours from the shop in reading knew precisely what were the things from which he dissented. He must nip William's visions in the bud, and he would thrash him. Happily, Mrs. Blake stepped between. It was a jarring shock to an over-sensitive child that a heavy penalty awaited the mention of visions. He continued to see them, but he kept them to himself. His brothers and sister were like his father. Robert, who in after years would have understood, was in the middle of his teething, and it did not yet appear what he would be. Hence all things worked together to separate William from his family and to thrust him into the world of imagination.

At this time--he was about nine years old--he became a devourer of books.

His mental bias was sufficiently strong to draw to him the books that would nourish him. Percy's _Reliques_, which was sure to be among his father's books, was entirely congenial to him, as later to little Walter Scott. Also Shakespeare and some of the Elizabethans, of whom Ben Jonson was certainly one, were absorbed into his being. Spencer's _Faery Queen_ and later poets of his own time--Rowley, Thomson, Chatterton--were his daily companions: and above all he adored with pa.s.sionate idolatry the then famous _Ossian_ of Macpherson.

Swinburne has expressed astonishment that the child Blake could admire such "lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style" as Macpherson supplied to an undiscerning generation. We must remember that in spite of the Highland Society, then meeting in London, Blake had no easy access to the times of Fingal and Ossian, such as we have to-day.

There was something in his genius which made him crave for the society of the Celtic heroes and G.o.ds. If Macpherson's poetic stream was muddy, Blake's thirst was too consuming to allow of criticism. What is disconcerting is that the mature Blake should retain his admiration of Macpherson and bracket him with the greatest poets of any age. We can only say that what we have loved with our whole heart in childhood, and has entered for better or worse into the very tissue of our being, we cannot criticize; and simple, trustful Blake to the end of his days would have reckoned himself guilty of impious disloyalty if he had admitted even to himself that there were spots in his sun.

Blake's reading had effected an invaluable service for him--it peopled his world of imagination. There was terror in his first approach on the threshold, a terror never forgotten and often reproduced in his designs.

But when he was pushed beyond the threshold and its covering shadow, he gradually grew accustomed to the changed lights, and he began to discern its forms and its outlines and its colours. These in their turn reacted on the outer world until he saw it not as a hard unsurpa.s.sable fact, but a mirror of the inner things which in reality were the substance, the form, and the foundation. Henceforth he valued the forms and outlines of things because they were a sign and pledge to him of the inner resplendent City which was not only built on an eternal foundation but was actually the home of his spirit. As soon as he apprehended the significance of outline he developed an ardent desire to draw.

This impulse was quickly observed by his father and encouraged by him.

William was sent to learn drawing from a Mr Pars, who kept a drawing-school in the Strand. Here he copied plaster casts and odd-and-end plaster bits of the human body, the body itself being left severely alone.

A certain amount of technical facility was thus acquired, but his education in art advanced more surely from his desultory wanderings in sale-rooms and in the private galleries of munificent n.o.blemen. At the sale-rooms he bought prints often for a few pence, and his little store of prints was added to by gifts from his father, who also presented him with models of the Gladiator, Hercules, Venus of Medici. In this way he gained his first enthusiastic knowledge of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Martin Hemskerck, Albert Durer and Julio Romano, who were exactly the right teachers for him. Michael Angelo and the Florentine School believed that drawing was the foundation of all great art. Albert Durer and his great German successors were of the same opinion. William Blake, the little citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, had known the horror of indefiniteness, and worked through his apprenticeship to joy only when he discovered that the blessed City stood four-square, and was bounded by great walls on its four sides. Hence his selection of prints was instinctive. He knew without being told what helped him to find himself, and he escaped once for all, while still a child, the seductive elegance of his own age.

These were happy years. His mind was already stored with unfashionable knowledge, gleaned chiefly from the robust Elizabethan age, and his spirit, like a mirror, reflected the things he saw with his spiritual eye.

His happiness was creative, and he burst into song when he was only eleven in strains that savoured of Ben Jonson, but were wholly fresh and captivating because they were inspired by the first fresh vision of his childhood. There is surely nothing in any language written by a boy of eleven to touch the song: _How sweet I roam'd from field to field_. It is a sudden spring of sparkling water that can never lose its purity.

Blake remained four years with Pars, and then his father, willing that his son should become an artist, apprenticed him in 1771 to Basire in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields.

We who stand far apart from Blake's day can see that this was the best thing that could have happened. Had his father been a rich man, able to pay a heavy premium that his son might be taught by one of the popular engravers of the day, we should have had the distressing picture of Blake moulded different and moulded wrong by a Woollett, a Bartolozzi, or an Angelica Kaufmann, and his whole soul in rebellious and ineffectual protest. As it was, Basire was master of the technical part of his craft, he believed in accurate, definite outline, and not being a man of genius, did not think it necessary that his pupils should turn out servile copies of himself. Blake learnt to handle his tools, to lay a good foundation, and technical proficiency. In after years, when engraving was to be a chief means of expressing his own original vision, he was saved from the painful necessity of having to unlearn much or all of his master's teaching.

After two quiet years with Basire a providential thing happened. Two more apprentices were taken on by him. These were wholly products of the time, and Blake found himself in violent collision with them in aims, methods, and tastes. To keep the peace, Blake was separated from them and sent to draw in Westminster Abbey.

Gothic architecture was as intoxicating a revelation to Blake as the discovery of Michael Angelo and Albert Durer in the sale-rooms of Christie and Langford. The Chapel of Edward the Confessor, recently piled up with sand-bags to protect it from the desecration of German bombs, became to Blake a little sanctuary. Here his thoughts travelled without fatigue many hundred years back, and the dim background of the Chapel became a fit setting for his bright visions of the past. He copied with silent intensity the monuments of the Confessor, Henry III, Queen Elinor, Philippa, and the beautiful work of Aymer de Valence. These days were decisive for his lifetime. Gothic architecture was germane to his own soul. Its spirit sank inwards and appeared again and again in the architectural fragments of his own designs. There remained for him one more great formative heritage from the past, and then, with his roots well set, he was to reach forward to the future and prophesy in rhythmic words that are meat and drink to us in the twentieth century.

Blake remained with Basire for seven years. During these years he had glimpses of a world different from the one in which his family moved.

Oliver Goldsmith, with his fine head, came as a shining messenger, and actually walked into Basire's. Oh! that he might grow up to have such a head! Woollett was a visitor, and a sufficiently frequent one to cease to be dazzling even to an overtrustful and enthusiastic apprentice. "One of the most ignorant fellows I ever met," he wrote of him who never at any time could have been congenial to his spirit. Many others appeared there also--silently marked and measured in a way that would have astonished them had they been worthy to know.

Blake's time was not wholly spent in copying the works of others. In his spare hours he threw off songs and designs of his own. These latter were sometimes partly copies of a much-loved master. Thus, _Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion_ was suggested by Michael Angelo's Crucifixion of St Peter in the Vatican, and the figure of Joseph is a copy.[1] Blake himself had written "engraved by W. Blake, 1773, from an old Italian Drawing"; "Michael Angelo, Pinxit." But already there is more of Blake in this design than of his master. He wrote between the lines, "This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; of whom the World was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages." From which we may gather that Blake was fully conscious that his being a Christian--and his Art was inseparable from his Christianity--had already consigned him to a solitary life in which he might expect persecutions, but certainly not a resting-place.

Blake's apprenticeship with Basire came to a peaceful end in 1778, when he was twenty-one years old. He was now a man, peering forward into a dim and cloudy future, looking backward on a childhood of clearest visions that were already pa.s.sing, and as it was, according to all precedent, had overstayed their time. One thing was entirely clear--he must earn his own living. Another thing he was conscious of was that he was slowly and surely leaving the past behind. Yet so far, seated amidst the ruins of the Old World, he knew not whither his religious aspirations would lead him.

He had fine memories, he had religious and art instincts that refused to be separated, he was finding himself daily in opposition to the admired religionists and artists of his time, and he felt within the strength of immense pa.s.sion which would surely drive him to the building of the heavenly Jerusalem if he could but get his vision clear again, and know the path which G.o.d had before marked out for him to walk in. His vision was to clear after many years. Meanwhile there were tempests and storms to be endured that would reduce still more effectually to wreckage the last remains of the Old World. That World had spoken with dignity and power through the lips of Dr Johnson, who was himself breaking up and died in 1784. With the death of Johnson the Old World died, to reappear only in a kind of after-mirage; and young Blake was struggling through the tempestuous years of his pa.s.sionate youth, turning with pain his eyes from the Past to the Future, and wistfully hoping that the mighty creative power that was already astir in him might fashion a new order in which he and his fellows could live at peace.

CHAPTER II

COMING OF AGE AND MARRIAGE

The Royal Academy is a British Inst.i.tution which we all patronize once a year, and then abuse that we may keep our self-respect. We go, impelled by a sense of high duty; but we presently relax and take our pleasure in Bond Street. In 1778 Bond Street did not lay itself out to encourage revolutionary artists, and Burlington House was not yet finished. The Royal Academy was turned out of Somerset Palace and was still waiting to turn into its new quarters.

Blake, on leaving Basire, immediately joined the Academy and studied in the Antique School under Mr Moser. This was not an auspicious beginning.

Moser had scant respect for Michael Angelo and Raphael, while he extolled to the skies the more fleshly works of Le Brun and Rubens. Some of us may wish that Moser had taught Blake to admire Rubens. But an angel from Heaven could not have done that. Clear outline was a necessity to keep him sane; blurred outline always gave him nightmare. Only the mystic who loves the flesh can rejoice in the roly-poly curves and tints of Rubens' fat Venuses. Moser did his best, and being an old man of seventy-three, felt he might advise a young man in his art studies. But Blake had now known for some years what he really liked, and his impetuosity led him to speak to Moser as if their positions were reversed.

Blake drew at the Academy not only from the antique but from living models. This was distasteful to him, because it was never his aim to reproduce exact portraits of outward things. Always his imagination must pierce through and illumine the object before him, and he found the posed model baffled him in this attempt, and made him scent death rather than life.

These were crowded days for Blake. He could not continue to live under his father's roof in Broad Street without contributing towards the household expenses, and therefore he must do work of marketable value. To this end he received orders for engraving from Johnson and other booksellers. It was drudging work, and Blake was not without his full share of drudgery.

To engrave after Stothard was to set a lion to speak in a monstrous little voice. But Stothard had his uses for Blake. Through a fellow-engraver Blake was introduced to Stothard, who, still young, was making a guinea a piece for his contributions to the _Novelist's Magazine_. Broad Street was in the thick of the Artists and Royal Academicians. Once Blake had pierced the magic circle and could meet them on equal terms, instead of merely watching their exits and their entrances through the doors of Broad Street, Poland Street, and Golden Square, they might prove of value to him, not by teaching him to paint as they painted, but by helping him to get customers for his own productions. Stothard had lately made the acquaintance of Flaxman, who had sought him out, and he introduced Blake to Flaxman, who in 1781 took a house at 27 Wardour Street and became Blake's close friend and neighbour.

At this time, in 1780, Blake threw off one of his very own magnificent designs known as _Morning, or Glad Day_. It is the real Blake with only one foot on earth, his head in a flood of light, and the symbols of his grub state--caterpillar and moth--at his feet. The rays of the light are darting north and south and east and west. Blake had weary years before him to work out his salvation to Glad Day. This design makes it certain that he already had had his glimpse of the end, and we shall find that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

London was not without its excitements. Lord George Gordon headed the No-Popery Riots in 1780, and through the unruly violence of the mob, London was in a panic for a week. Lord George was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, where he was visited by the ubiquitous John Wesley, who found him well instructed in the Bible and not disposed to complain.

It is impossible to trace accurately what books Blake read at this time.

It is evident that he observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs, and sought nourishment elsewhere. It is probable that he read Boehme, Paracelsus, Fludd, Madame Guyon, and St Theresa in his spare hours.

But there were other imperious needs surging up in him. The creative pa.s.sion of love was driving him hither and thither. With his tendency to view all things in the light of eternity, he was pa.s.sionately in love with the eternal feminine, into which any pair of bright eyes would serve as windows. The particular pair of eyes that captivated him belonged to "a lively little girl" called Polly Wood, with whom he kept company for a while. Polly's conversation was probably no more suitable as a permanent entertainment to Blake than that of a modern flapper. Fortunately, she understood little affairs of the heart much better than he did, not taking them more seriously than they deserved; and when she saw symptoms of tremendously earnest love-making threatening to engulf her, she quickly shook him off with a sharp stroke, "Are you a fool?" and left him feeling very lacerated and sorry for himself.